


Perach (a certain kind of sadness)

by sibley (ferns)



Series: Tikkun Olam [6]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Hopeful Ending, Judaism, Mortality, Season/Series 03, Trans Female Character, jewish west-allen family, semi rediscovery of faith, the oven of akhnai is important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 21:04:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15348693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: As the stopwatch towards her fatal encounter with Savitar ticks ever closer, Iris finds herself doing a lot of reflecting. And crying. Mostly at the park not far from where she grew up. Wally finds her there.





	Perach (a certain kind of sadness)

**Author's Note:**

> Set in late season three, but I'm not quite sure when. The theme is death, but I didn't want to tag major character death since it's about coming to terms with _not_ being willing to die, and as we all should hopefully know by now, Iris didn't die at Savitar's poorly written hands. Plus, you know! Hopeful ending!

Iris doesn’t know if she believes in a capital-G God. She knows the speed force is kind of godlike, in a sense, and she knows that she is one of its favorites. Barry told her so, once. She’s not sure how she feels about it.

But right now, what Iris needs is a God.

She needs something-she needs some _o_ _ne_ to be angry at, more than Savitar and more than the world. She needs someone who is trying to save her, some higher power who won’t let her die. She needs… Something. Someone. A God who can protect her and let her be angry at them, because Iris is so, so angry. She doesn’t want to die. Please, God, don’t let her die.

All she could really do was pray. All of their efforts were _useless._ Everything that _she_ did was useless-so _fucking_ useless. Iris wondered how everyone did it. How everyone dealt with knowing that their lives were on a clock. A stopwatch ticking toward zero while life slipped through their fingers. Slipped through _her_ fingers. Iris’s stopwatch wasn’t set to some random date, to a future dying peacefully surrounded by her family. Iris’s time ended when a madman stabbed her through the chest from behind.

Wally is the one who finds her at the park, watching kids play with their parents on the swingset. He leans over the bench behind her and to her right. “Barry said you’d be here.”

“Did he also tell you I wanted space?” Iris is sure that Wally can hear the rawness in her voice, left over from the latest round of private sobbing. No, she _knows_ that he can hear it. He’s her brother, after all, but he’s also not an idiot. He doesn’t say anything about it, though.

“Yeah, he did.” Wally sits down next to her anyway and fidgets with the little rubber bracelet he wears. It’s from some concert or another that he attended with Jax awhile back. Iris doesn’t think he’s ever told her the full story. “But I thought… I don’t know.”

He looks up at the clouds. There are a lot of them, promising rain by this evening. They sit in silence. Wally clears his throat a little and Iris looks at him, sniffling a bit. Nobody, except maybe for Barry, was supposed to see her like this. _Nobody ever._ She’s supposed to be strong. She’s supposed to keep Barry on track to defeat the monster who’s getting closer to killing her with every passing second. But she can’t.

“How did Dad raise you?” Wally’s still looking up at the clouds, but he must be able to feel Iris staring at him in confusion, because he clarifies, “Like-are you Christian? Jewish?”

Iris stays silent. She looks at the kids in the park again and thinks for a long time. Wally doesn’t say another word. “I don’t know,” she admits. “We celebrate Christmas. But that’s the only Christian holiday we celebrate. The rest of-the rest of me is Jewish. I guess. You?”

“Mom raised me Jewish,” Wally says quietly. It’s not the answer Iris is expecting. She asked more out of formality than anything else. “We belonged to a temple as long as it took me to become a bar mitzvah, and then a little after that. It was… I don’t know. There wasn’t a party, and not that many people came, but it was-it was one of the best days of my life.”

“My bat mitzvah was a pretty big affair, I guess.” It all comes rushing out, and Wally doesn’t interrupt her. “It was well known to my-our-synagogue that I was going to be having a _bat_ mitzvah, they’d known since I was seven, and I was so nervous about it all, I just-I thought I was going to vomit my guts out up there on the bema in front of everyone. But-but it was _wonderful._ Standing up there in front of basically everyone and bringing the torah around and-”

Iris cuts herself off and bowed her head a little bit, looking at Wally out of the corner of her eye. This feels like bragging. She doesn’t want to _brag._ The mothers and fathers were apparently noticing what Wally already had-that the grey clouds covering the sun above them promised rain-and were gathering up their gleeful children. Rain which Iris could already smell in the air. Petrichor.

“Why did you ask?” It’s surprisingly difficult to get the words out. Her stomach hurts and she digs her fingers into her leggings at the knees until she can feel the nail through the navy blue fabric.

“I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to talk about something that _wasn’t_ you dying, and I remembered you saying something to Barry the other day about how you weren’t sure there was much more we could do other than pray, and…” Wally shrugs slowly. “I guess I just wanted to know who exactly you were praying to. You know?”

“I think I like the idea of praying to a Jewish God better than I like the idea of praying to a Christian one,” Iris whispers. It feels weird to say. “At least for this. Maybe? At least for _me._ I don’t know- _shit,_ Wally, I don’t-” And then before she knows it, she’s crying again. “I don’t want to die. I really, really don’t want to die.”

He hugs her tightly from the side as she takes shuddering breaths before swiveling around and burying her face in his shoulder, squeezing back as hard as she can. Which, despite being not _that_ hard, is enough to make Wally tighten his grip, until they’re both clinging to each other while the first few fat drops of rain fall out of the sky onto Iris’s head.

She pulls back from her baby brother with a little hiss when she feels it, yanking up her hood and tucking her hair in. Wally laughs and mimics her, pulling up the hood of his-“You’re wearing a Flash raincoat.”

“Jax got it for me. He thought it was funny,” Wally smiles the way he does whenever his boyfriend gets brought up. It makes Iris feel warm inside. She likes the idea of Wally having someone who makes him feel the way that she does about Barry. Friends to something different. “Do you want to walk home, or should I run you there?”

By ‘home’, Iris knows he means the loft. Her home with Barry. And as much as she loves Barry, she doesn’t want that right now. She wants to spend time with Wally. With her dad. “Actually, can you run me to dad’s place?”

“You mean _my_ place?” He teases as he scoops her up. Not like Barry does, where he holds onto her like he’s afraid of letting go, but like he always has. Sure of what he’s doing and confident that the speed force will take care of the rest in a way that not even Barry has been. It’s strange. After his time being imprisoned in the speed force, Iris would have thought that he would stop the habit. But he hasn’t.

She blinks, and they’re there, inside the door and all. Iris shrugs off her coat and Wally does the same, hanging them both on the same hook. Joe’s sitting up on the couch, clutching his chest and glaring at Wally as he rubs a little circle over his heart with his thumb.

“One of these days,” he groans as he relaxes, “I swear it. One of these days you or Barry is gonna come running in here without warning and my heart will just decide it can’t take it anymore. Iris, are you staying for dinner, or just stopping by?”

Iris laughs and hugs him from behind, kissing his cheek before she makes her way onto the couch to sit next to him. “I’m not sure yet.” Something in her heart feels very, very strange, and very full, and she’s pretty sure she’s going to start crying again soon. Instead, she nudges her dad with her shoulder. “You should tell Wally about how your mom wanted you to be a cantor because of your voice.”

Wally gasps and whips around from where he was slowly sneaking into the kitchen to grab those nasty cherry butterscotch things he likes for some reason. “I’ve only ever heard him singing in the shower, when the water makes it sound all weird, and _once_ when he was cooking and thought I wasn’t home. I never even thought of-man, you _would’ve_ made a great cantor!”

Joe rolls his eyes. “Iris, did you have to tell him?”

Iris kisses his cheek again and laughs in his ear. This feels unusual. Like there’s a dam that’s been broken down between her and Wally. Like she’s _finally_ after all this time realizing that even if they had grown up together, some things would’ve stayed the exact same, even if she subconsciously understood it a long time ago, because of _course,_ logically, some things would be the same. It feels good. _So,_ so good. Cup of hot chocolate from Jitters good. Waking up in Barry’s arms good. Saving the day good.

Wally is her brother, her super-smart, super-fast, super-great little brother who she didn’t know she had until over a year and a half ago. Wally is the guy who was-who _is_ just as determined to save her from Savitar as Barry is. She loves him. She loves him so much. And she loves her dad.

It’s not until Wally hugs onto her from behind that she realizes she’s crying _again,_ because of _course_ she is. Three times just wasn’t enough for one day, was it? She really had to go for a fourth, didn’t she?

Wally rubs her back and her dad hugs her from the front and Iris melts into them and-

 _Iris West will not die._ Iris swears that to herself for the hundredth time. _Iris Ann West will not die. Savitar will not kill her. Savitar will not kill_ me.

She won’t die until it is on her terms. She refuses. She doesn’t care if Savitar, or the timeline, or fate, or God themselves says differently. If there is one thing she is sure of, it is that no matter what, nothing will happen until she decides it. The world is trying to rip the timeline out of her hands. Trying to control her fate. Whether the force behind that is God or not, Iris doesn’t care.

All she knows is that she will _not_ let it happen. It is her life. It is her _everything._ Her brother, her husband, her father, her friends, her family, her future, her job, her faith, her home. It’s not like she hasn’t promised herself that she won’t let Savitar be the one to kill her before. But this time it feels different. (Iris tries not to think about how it felt different all the other times too, like she’s trapped in some sort of sick cycle.)

When Iris was seven, she stopped pretending to be a boy and told her dad that she wasn’t going to force herself to do so anymore. When Iris was eight, she met Barry Allen, who showed her a cool bug he found. When Iris was eleven, her best friend came to live with her. When Iris was thirteen, she had her bat mitzvah, and wondered why Barry didn’t have his. When Iris was eighteen, she figured herself out. When Iris was twenty-four, her best friend became a superhero. When Iris was twenty-six, she found out she had a brother.

When Iris was twenty-seven, she found out that she was going to die. Without a doubt, she would be murdered. Killed by a monster playacting at being a god. But if there is one thing that Iris West is sure of, it is that she is not going to die. Not at the hands of someone like that. Not at the hands of _anyone._

There is a Jewish story. The Oven of Akhnai. About an oven which is the subject of heated debate by a group of rabbis over whether or not it is impure. All the rabbis state that it isn’t, while one says that it is, devising a series of tests to prove that it is-asking for walls to fall and carobs to grow and for streams to reverse themselves all by the will of God at his request in order to prove that the oven is pure enough for ritual use.

The tests succeed-the stream reverses itself. The carob grows. The walls fall, only to be scolded by another rabbi for interrupting their meeting. God agrees with the rabbi who says that the oven is pure. But still, the other rabbis insist that he is wrong, and that the oven can’t be used. Finally, the rabbi cries out in frustration for the very heavens themselves to open and agree with him. Which they do, for God is universally claiming that this rabbi who believes the oven can be used is the correct one.

The response from the other rabbis who disagree is, “It is not in heaven.”

Why should they listen to God say something that they did not write in the torah? They need not regard a divine voice telling them whether they are right or wrong. They have the torah. And they have themselves.

Iris has herself. Her fate is not written yet. She is sure of it. And if it _is_ already written, by some God or another, she will erase it from existence entirely, as if it was never there at all, and she will write her _own_ narrative. She knows she will. It is not in heaven. Not yet. Not ever.

(Years later, another rabbi encountered Elijah the prophet, and asked him what God had done when they received that answer from the rabbis deciding the fate of the oven, and Elijah said that God had smiled, perhaps proudly, and said, “My children have triumphed over Me. My children have triumphed over Me.”)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm danteramon on tumblr.


End file.
